Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi, ‘Methodological heteronormativity and the “refugee crisis”‘, 2018

Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi, ‘Methodological heteronormativity and the “refugee crisis”‘, 2018 Feminist Media Studies, 18:6, 1120-1123

Abstract

All migration politics is reproductive politics. The nation-state project of controlling migration secures the racialised demographics of the nation, understood as a reproducible fact of the social and human body, determining who is differentially included, who is excluded, and who is exalted. Citizenship, illegality, and asylum are often affirmed or rejected as inheritable transitive properties that adhere to a person by virtue of heteronormative (or, more rarely, homonormative) configurations of kinship. As Eithne Luibhéid (2013, 4) has argued, sexual normativity is crucial to nation-state projects of “biological and social reproduction of the citizenry, but also for the cultivation of particular kinds of social, economic, and affective relationships.” Sexual normativity is a key register through which the (in)assimilability of non-citizens is projected in media representations of migrants, which increasingly proliferate in a time of declared “crisis” (Karma R. Chávez 2013). As Radha Sarma Hegde (2016, 2) observes, we are “routinely exposed to images of men, women, and children undertaking the harsh journey across Central America … [or] perilous sea voyages from North and Sub-Saharan Africa” and the Middle East. In this commentary, we wish to put forward a provocation about the omnipresence of methodological heteronormativity in the (visual) discourse surrounding the declared “refugee crisis.”